Reliable, official numbers now in for February show that it was by far the warmest of 1,622 months on record

What is the significance of reaching this new milestone? And now that El Niño is waning, what might the future bring?

Earlier this month, a spate of headlines proclaimed that February 2016 was the warmest month on record for the globe. At that time, I wrote that we should wait until official, reliable analyses were in before drawing any final conclusions.

SEE ALSO: February may have been the warmest on record, but we don’t know for sure — despite reports to the contrary